Even though I don't live there any more I visit regularly and keep well informed of affairs through regular phone calls and emails with my mom.
In Nigeria the government sanctioned minimum wage was recently (actually about 1 year ago) increased to about $50 a month. Even though there is great wealth in the country it is disproportionately distributed with a few being mega-rich, some living at subsistence level and millions living below UN poverty levels. In countries like Nigeria the Internet is far from being a social phenomenon and is seen more as a business tool for those that can afford it (banks, oil companies, etc.) or as a plaything for the rich. The average individual has little access to potable water, electricity and telephones let alone a high bandwidth connection and a PC. Most people who need to use the internet go to business centres (places like Kinkos) and pay per minute to check their hotmail or send email to relatives who live too far away to call. The internet may be ubiqituos and a way of life here (i.e. the US) but this is a far cry from what is happening in third world countries.
As much as I hate "me too" posts. So do I especially when they use a +1 bonus and contain no content or opinion.
That said what is so wrong with the merger? NSI provides domain names and Verisign provides e-commerce services and security. So it seems that the purpose of the merger is to create some sort of one stop shop for businesses to buy a domain, create an online (probably e-commerce) presence and secure it. What is so bad about this? It's not like either of the companies provide a service that cannot be obtained elsewhere so there aren't even any monopolistic overtones. Personally I feel that the jack-of-all trades approach to doing business is very difficutlt to excel in...just ask the McAfee corporation who attempted to become such a one stop e-commerce shop only to start taking significant losses instead of focusing on their core competencies.
From the article: The program incorporates courses in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, graphic design and human kinetics. The goal is to create students who are not only able to code and design games but also have an understanding of the societal impact and significance of this $7 billion industry.
IIRC the purpose of a college education is to provide a person with the skills required to succeed in the real world (i.e. workplace in one's future career). Currently gaming is pulling in almost as much money as Hollywood (the movie industry) yet most college computer science curriculums(sp?) act like it doesn't exist. On the other hand we see nothing wrong with film schools or colleges with curriculum emphasizing parts of of the cinematographic process including acting. People like you with their heads in the sand disgust me. Have you ever looked at the source code for Quake I or ever wondered how difficult a management process is involved in game development? After all isn't game development still software development?
Why is a course exploring various aspects of the game development process and its ramifications to society as a whole suddenly a bad idea? Does the fact that the software being developed is primarily going to be used for entertainment purposes somehow make game development trivial...I guess with that reasoning all the work done from 1960s on ARPANET till today building the infrastructure, protocols and software that is the Internet is pretty trivial since most people who use the internet today do so to use chat rooms, view porn, browse the web etc.
PS: The article makes no mention of Quake, this addition seems to have been made by the original poster for sensationalistic effect which has been achieved given your rant.
He used that patent offensively, not defensively. (And as far as was mentioned, B&N wasn't throwing Amazon any legal punches before Amazon did). Read my earlier post about the punches that B&N has thrown Amazon or even better do a search for Amazon, B&N and the words lawsuit or sue and you'll be rather surprised to see the amount of blows that have been thrown by both parties. The rivalry between both companies is similar to the irrational hatreds that run deep within the Sun and Microsoft camps. The reason few geeks know about is that it's been mainly news for the book industry and few else.
Barnes and Noble would have patented it and may have been much worse than Amazon. After all Barnes and Noble sued Amazon the day after barnesandnoble.com went online because it claimed Amazon was not "Earth's biggest bookstore" as the Amazon slogan said.
Barnes and Noble has been out to crush Amazon the same way it bullied and crushed independent booksellers for at least the past two years. After all B&N was trying to become a true monopolist by buying up book publishers then using that against their competitors. IMHO opinion Amazon got this patent just to protect them against B&N which has showed itself to be a completely ruthless and unscrupulous competitor.
God only knows how much worse things would have been if Barnes and Noble had gotten the patent. That said the patent is still wrong but if the USPTO is going to be stupid enough to grant those patents then Amazon has a right to grab as many as possible to protect themselves from Barnes & Noble.
Besides the inbuilt text-speech which is kind off cool. The so called innovations are doable in Unix, off course they actually involve making the administrator earn his pay by writing scripts that suit his needs as opposed to adding bloat to the OS on features that can only cause trouble. Besides the fact that there may be a good reason for me to have two identical files on my machine or that two files may be identical bitwise but may be totally different (e.g. an ASCII textfile and a binary file).This so called innovation calls for a process to be constantly running on a box that is hashing filenames and storing them in a database, performing database lookups and symlinking files. Now unless this process is constantly running (and hence slowing my machine down, making my 128Mbs of RAM on a 450Mhz K-6 seem slow) then what happens when 2 files are symlinked for being alike then one is changed when the other shouldn't? This is a recipe for disaster and nt an innovation. As for the statistical trouble shooting tool crap, all it is is a computer generated FAQ that you don't have to read. After using Norton Utilities on my home PC and seeing what happens when you let a piece of software pick a solution to a problem for you instead of reading for yourself and solving the problem as it applies to your situation I cannot call that an innovation but instead another way to shot yourself in the foot.
Altogether, nine separate groups within Microsoft Research contributed more than 15 innovations to Windows 2000, including everything from the computer code that identifies bugs and security attacks to the underlying technology that enables computer applications to encrypt and decrypt confidential information. ... Typically, Microsoft centers its research on innovations that will be ready for development three to seven years in the future.
So let me see this means that each group took three to seven years coming up with 1.5 innovations that already exist on Unix systems. No wonder people call them Microsloth.
From the information on the USPTO site which I posted it seems that one can patent an idea. It just has to be a well fleshed out and specified idea. This means with drawings and blueprints if possible. This allows for the patenting of a machine,process or manufacture when the inventor cannot afford to build it. For instance, there are several patents for devices that have not yet been invented yet. IIRC several oil companies have patents on various electric cars or electric car concepts defensively so as to make development of such cars more difficult. Anyway to answer the ask slashdot question, if your idea is concrete enough to be specified in documentation as opposed to something vague like "a website like Amazon but for geeks" then go for it. The patent office does not require a working model or implemntation of your idea to give you a patent.
(Excerpted from General Information Concerning Patents print brochure) The patent law specifies the general field of subject matter that can be patented and the conditions under which a patent may be obtained. In the language of the statute, any person who "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent," subject to the conditions and requirements of the law. The word "process" is defined by law as a process, act or method, and primarily includes industrial or technical processes. The term "machine" used in the statute needs no explanation. The term "manufacture" refers to articles which are made, and includes all manufactured articles. The term "composition of matter" relates to chemical compositions and may include mixtures of ingredients as well as new chemical compounds. These classes of subject matter taken together include practically everything which is made by man and the processes for making the products. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 excludes the patenting of inventions useful solely in the utilization of special nuclear material or atomic energy for atomic weapons. The patent law specifies that the subject matter must be "useful." The term "useful" in this connection refers to the condition that the subject matter has a useful purpose and also includes operativeness, that is, a machine which will not operate to perform the intended purpose would not be called useful, and therefore would not be granted a patent. Interpretations of the statute by the courts have defined the limits of the field of subject matter which can be patented, thus it has been held that the laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter. A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required.
XML is a data interchange format. Many legacy systems contain data in disparate formats, and with the advent of the internet lots of developers are working on various ways to connect these systems using the Internet. One of their challenges is to be able to exchange data between systems that ordinarily are not compatible. XML might be the answer. Since the XML text format is standards based (implying that many applications can understand it), data can be converted to XML and then easily read by another system or application. For instance it would be a whole lot easier for banks or insurance companies to trade information with each other (epecially over the internet) using an agreed upon XML standard than using conflicting proprietary protocols.
Using XML for Web data. Imagine having an HTML page in which none of the content is located on the page itself. Instead, the content is stored in an XML file, and the HTML page is used simply for formatting and display. The content can be updated, translated into another language, or otherwise modified without an author ever having to touch the HTML code.:-)
Using XML to create a common data store for information that might get used in many different ways. Suppose, for example, that you are writing an article for a magazine or publishing a research paper. The publisher also wants to include the article on a Web site and then submit it for inclusion in a book or journal. If the original article was authored in a proprietary format, such as Microsoft's Word format, the article would have to be reworked for the Web posting and then probably reworked again for the book or journal. If the article was written in XML, however, it could be published to the three different environments simultaneously because the data of the article is independent of how it is being displayed. The formatting, layout, and so on are dependent upon the application using the data and are not attached to the content itself. Furthermore, the application code that displays the data needs to be written only once, and it then can be used to display any number of articles.
These are the three I can remember from all the XML books I've read in the past few months.
It's farly reasonable to assume that there wont be any major internet taxes imposed as any state will realise the danger of pushing business into other states and loosing out......
One would expect this to be true but then again if states like Texas can ban online car sales by car manufacturers solely to preserve the position of middlemen (car dealerships), who knows?
I tried to watch the show but after the 1st 10 minutes the sheer chessiness of the show made me reach for my remote control. I had a good evening with Fox too with the new Episodes of the simpson's and malcom in the middle...but after only 10 minutes of X-files I swiitched to HBO to watch the Sopranos. Now that's a good show.
Too bad it doesn't qualify as News for nerds cause I'd love to yak about Tony's neurosis,,Christopher's growing awareness of his talents and junior (Tony's kid not the uncle) quoting Nietzsze (sp?) and Master P when asking what man's purpose for being is. This is a great show.
Watching X-files has been a rather tedious experience for months now, and this episode is the straw that has broken this camel's back. Such cheap exploitative TV I expect from Fox but not on the X-files. This will mark my departure from watching the show. Adieu Mulder and scully it's been fun.
We'd need a way for the mobile devices to talk to each other first. Either through a hardware standard(ugh!) or wireless protocol (such as Blutooth). Once that is done then we can concern ourselves with a uniform data transfer standard. Working at a mobile device to mobile device data transfer standard now would be putting the cart waaaay before the horse.
There I was thinking that ActiveX was a bad idea simply because of the dozen or so exploits I have seen announced ZDNet over the past few months (visit the Windows Update site sometime and count all the IE 5.0 patches).
Actually I'm lying, the real reason ActiveX is a bad idea is that it gives waaaay too much power to in-browser apps. Why would I want a plug in I download from a website (not an application or.exe mind you) have the ability to modify system files on my machine? At least Java browser apps work in a security sandbox and cannot affect system files.
Free Software is NOT about making better software, is it NOT about fixing bugs and it is NOT about adding features. It is about MORAL rights and freedoms, it is about the right to study the source code just because I fell like it, about the right to use it to do whatever I want.
If people like you claiming that they have the right to see the source code so they can cheat at Quake are the kind of people that have been emailing Slade for the source no wonder he is pissed. First of all where the fsck did this RIGHT to look at software come from? Is there some country (not the US that's for sure) where this is some unalienable right? From the GNU site: The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This seems to imply that the GPL is about bug fixes and adding features. Also from the GNU page: For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. This also implies that the GPL is meant to be applied to people who are actually given the software or receive it in some way. I am not certain that Slade's program is being distributed to it's users and thus qualifies to have its source viewed on request.
Finally as for the original spirit of the GPL I have always likened it to automobiles and Microsoft's Windows. Now if I buy a car and something goes wrong with it (broken tail light, leaky radiator, whatever) nothing stops me from viewing the manufacturer's specs for my car, going over to Pep Boys to buy parts and tools, and fixing my car. Now on the other hand if Windows crashes and I have a Ph.D from M.I.T. in Operating Systems and got a 4.0 all through my college career I can't do shit but reboot and pray it doesn't happen again. This is wrong. It is wrongs like this that the GPL was created to right and NOT to satisfy some unalienable right to read everybody else's code.
PS: GPL is NOT like the public domain because you have no right to ask for code or do anything you like with it if the binaries were not distributed to you. As for Romeo and Juliet, it is in public domain because Shakespare is dead and has been dead for over 70 years. Of course when he was alive YOU would not have the right to do anything with HIS work if not approved by him.
Not sure when it was anounced but this story was on C|Net over two weeks ago.
What's really interesting is that even though FreePC has failed its legacy will live on. Hardware profit margins are now slim to non-existent and almost every major PC manufacturer is now involved in selling internet access to customers as a way to increase revenue streams from their customers. Who said scorched earth business models don't benefit the consumer?
Wrong comparison...it's the same thing as buying a CD and burning a copy for all your friends. The RIAA should be worried like this; for instance if I told you to go to MP3.com and select the user name MusicLover and the password PhatBeats to access all 200 of my CDs I have successfully ripped off 200 artists. This is rather interesting and right now it seems that no one is focusing on this.
Cmdr Taco: Kinda a fluff piece: any piece that explains what a compiler is is probably fluff
CNet: Much of the performance gain that's expected from Itanium will only become a reality if compilers can line up instructions in just the right way so that the chip can operate efficiently. And compilers also are an essential tool for getting higher-level software, such as databases or e-commerce software, to work on the new chip.
What stops me from getting an account at MP3.com, uploading some CDs then sharing this account with ALL my friends? Won't this lead to the same kind of pseudo-piracy that exists today with downloading MP3s of people's computers via Napster? After all most sites allow you to log in from multiple computers, so what stops me from uploading a few CDs and posting my account info on my webpage so everyone can share my taste in music?
2. To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
As an African in America it is troubling to see yet another black man hide behind so-called racism once they are caught in a bad situation. As a programmer who one day hopes to contribute code that it will be GPLed it is troubling that a fellow black man may hide behind racism to justify the reasons his company refused to abide by my license. By the way slashdot and VA Linux do not in any way control the content on this "board", so your comments on lynching should be directed at the posters of those comments and not Slashdot or VA Linux (I hope you don't think by playing the race card you will get them to censor those posts?)
That we've fucked up is not in dispute. Glad you realize...we all mess up every once in a while but your company is taking this to the next level.
That we had the balls to come to New York should also not be in dispute. It takes balls for a legitimate company to come to computer expo?
And, when we succed in our re-engineering and overhaul of our practices we'll expect the same level of coverage of that too. Beleive me when I say I'll be on your website every other day checking up on it and once there's any mention of a "successful engineering" slashdot will be flooded with submissions.
I've read design patterns and agree that it is one of the most useful books I've ever read (right up there with books by Scott Meyers, Sedgewick and Bjarne Stousstrup)...Click on the Amazon link to read several comprehensive user reviews of the book just in case the link above seemed rather dry to you.
PS: Please do not buy this book on Amazon. Go to Addall and find a vendor. Please keep up the boycott...thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I don't live there any more I visit regularly and keep well informed of affairs through regular phone calls and emails with my mom.
In Nigeria the government sanctioned minimum wage was recently (actually about 1 year ago) increased to about $50 a month. Even though there is great wealth in the country it is disproportionately distributed with a few being mega-rich, some living at subsistence level and millions living below UN poverty levels. In countries like Nigeria the Internet is far from being a social phenomenon and is seen more as a business tool for those that can afford it (banks, oil companies, etc.) or as a plaything for the rich. The average individual has little access to potable water, electricity and telephones let alone a high bandwidth connection and a PC. Most people who need to use the internet go to business centres (places like Kinkos) and pay per minute to check their hotmail or send email to relatives who live too far away to call.
The internet may be ubiqituos and a way of life here (i.e. the US) but this is a far cry from what is happening in third world countries.
As much as I hate "me too" posts.
So do I especially when they use a +1 bonus and contain no content or opinion.
That said what is so wrong with the merger? NSI provides domain names and Verisign provides e-commerce services and security. So it seems that the purpose of the merger is to create some sort of one stop shop for businesses to buy a domain, create an online (probably e-commerce) presence and secure it. What is so bad about this? It's not like either of the companies provide a service that cannot be obtained elsewhere so there aren't even any monopolistic overtones.
Personally I feel that the jack-of-all trades approach to doing business is very difficutlt to excel in...just ask the McAfee corporation who attempted to become such a one stop e-commerce shop only to start taking significant losses instead of focusing on their core competencies.
Yahoo News version of the story.
From the article:
The program incorporates courses in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, graphic design and human kinetics. The goal is to create students who are not only able to code and design games but also have an understanding of the societal impact and significance of this $7 billion industry.
IIRC the purpose of a college education is to provide a person with the skills required to succeed in the real world (i.e. workplace in one's future career). Currently gaming is pulling in almost as much money as Hollywood (the movie industry) yet most college computer science curriculums(sp?) act like it doesn't exist. On the other hand we see nothing wrong with film schools or colleges with curriculum emphasizing parts of of the cinematographic process including acting. People like you with their heads in the sand disgust me. Have you ever looked at the source code for Quake I or ever wondered how difficult a management process is involved in game development? After all isn't game development still software development?
Why is a course exploring various aspects of the game development process and its ramifications to society as a whole suddenly a bad idea? Does the fact that the software being developed is primarily going to be used for entertainment purposes somehow make game development trivial...I guess with that reasoning all the work done from 1960s on ARPANET till today building the infrastructure, protocols and software that is the Internet is pretty trivial since most people who use the internet today do so to use chat rooms, view porn, browse the web etc.
PS: The article makes no mention of Quake, this addition seems to have been made by the original poster for sensationalistic effect which has been achieved given your rant.
Linux Kernel Internals 2e Beck, Bohme, Dziadzka, Kunitz, Magnus, Verworner Addison-Wesley 1998 480 pages ISBN 0-201-33143-8
Linux Device Drivers Rubini O'Reilly 1998 421 pages ISBN 1-56592-292-1
Linux Core Kernel Commentary Maxwell Coriolis Press 1999 575 pages ISBN 1-57610-469-9
Applied Operating System Concepts 1e Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne Wiley 2000 840 pages ISBN 0-471-36508-4
He used that patent offensively, not defensively. (And as far as was mentioned, B&N wasn't throwing Amazon any legal punches before Amazon did).
Read my earlier post about the punches that B&N has thrown Amazon or even better do a search for Amazon, B&N and the words lawsuit or sue and you'll be rather surprised to see the amount of blows that have been thrown by both parties. The rivalry between both companies is similar to the irrational hatreds that run deep within the Sun and Microsoft camps. The reason few geeks know about is that it's been mainly news for the book industry and few else.
Barnes and Noble would have patented it and may have been much worse than Amazon. After all Barnes and Noble sued Amazon the day after barnesandnoble.com went online because it claimed Amazon was not "Earth's biggest bookstore" as the Amazon slogan said.
Barnes and Noble has been out to crush Amazon the same way it bullied and crushed independent booksellers for at least the past two years. After all B&N was trying to become a true monopolist by buying up book publishers then using that against their competitors. IMHO opinion Amazon got this patent just to protect them against B&N which has showed itself to be a completely ruthless and unscrupulous competitor.
God only knows how much worse things would have been if Barnes and Noble had gotten the patent. That said the patent is still wrong but if the USPTO is going to be stupid enough to grant those patents then Amazon has a right to grab as many as possible to protect themselves from Barnes & Noble.
Besides the inbuilt text-speech which is kind off cool. The so called innovations are doable in Unix, off course they actually involve making the administrator earn his pay by writing scripts that suit his needs as opposed to adding bloat to the OS on features that can only cause trouble.
Besides the fact that there may be a good reason for me to have two identical files on my machine or that two files may be identical bitwise but may be totally different (e.g. an ASCII textfile and a binary file).This so called innovation calls for a process to be constantly running on a box that is hashing filenames and storing them in a database, performing database lookups and symlinking files. Now unless this process is constantly running (and hence slowing my machine down, making my 128Mbs of RAM on a 450Mhz K-6 seem slow) then what happens when 2 files are symlinked for being alike then one is changed when the other shouldn't? This is a recipe for disaster and nt an innovation.
As for the statistical trouble shooting tool crap, all it is is a computer generated FAQ that you don't have to read. After using Norton Utilities on my home PC and seeing what happens when you let a piece of software pick a solution to a problem for you instead of reading for yourself and solving the problem as it applies to your situation I cannot call that an innovation but instead another way to shot yourself in the foot.
Altogether, nine separate groups within Microsoft Research contributed more than 15 innovations to Windows 2000, including everything from the computer code that identifies bugs and security attacks to the underlying technology that enables computer applications to encrypt and decrypt confidential information.
...
Typically, Microsoft centers its research on innovations that will be ready for development three to seven years in the future.
So let me see this means that each group took three to seven years coming up with 1.5 innovations that already exist on Unix systems. No wonder people call them Microsloth.
From the information on the USPTO site which I posted it seems that one can patent an idea. It just has to be a well fleshed out and specified idea. This means with drawings and blueprints if possible. This allows for the patenting of a machine,process or manufacture when the inventor cannot afford to build it.
For instance, there are several patents for devices that have not yet been invented yet. IIRC several oil companies have patents on various electric cars or electric car concepts defensively so as to make development of such cars more difficult.
Anyway to answer the ask slashdot question, if your idea is concrete enough to be specified in documentation as opposed to something vague like "a website like Amazon but for geeks" then go for it. The patent office does not require a working model or implemntation of your idea to give you a patent.
WHAT CAN BE PATENTED
(Excerpted from General Information Concerning Patents print brochure)
The patent law specifies the general field of subject matter that can be patented and the conditions under which a patent may be obtained.
In the language of the statute, any person who "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent," subject to the conditions and requirements of the law. The word "process" is defined by law as a process, act or method, and primarily includes industrial or technical processes. The term "machine" used in the statute needs no explanation. The term "manufacture" refers to articles which are made, and includes all manufactured articles. The term "composition of matter" relates to chemical compositions and may include mixtures of ingredients as well as new chemical compounds. These classes of subject matter taken together include practically everything which is made by man and the processes for making the products.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 excludes the patenting of inventions useful solely in the utilization of special nuclear material or atomic energy for atomic weapons.
The patent law specifies that the subject matter must be "useful." The term "useful" in this connection refers to the condition that the subject matter has a useful purpose and also includes operativeness, that is, a machine which will not operate to perform the intended purpose would not be called useful, and therefore would not be granted a patent.
Interpretations of the statute by the courts have defined the limits of the field of subject matter which can be patented, thus it has been held that the laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter.
A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required.
XML is a data interchange format. Many legacy systems contain data in disparate formats, and with the advent of the internet lots of developers are working on various ways to connect these systems using the Internet. One of their challenges is to be able to exchange data between systems that ordinarily are not compatible. XML might be the answer. Since the XML text format is standards based (implying that many applications can understand it), data can be converted to XML and then easily read by another system or application. For instance it would be a whole lot easier for banks or insurance companies to trade information with each other (epecially over the internet) using an agreed upon XML standard than using conflicting proprietary protocols.
Using XML for Web data. Imagine having an HTML page in which none of the content is located on the page itself. Instead, the content is stored in an XML file, and the HTML page is used simply for formatting and display. The content can be updated, translated into another language, or otherwise modified without an author ever having to touch the HTML code.
Using XML to create a common data store for information that might get used in many different ways. Suppose, for example, that you are writing an article for a magazine or publishing a research paper. The publisher also wants to include the article on a Web site and then submit it for inclusion in a book or journal. If the original article was authored in a proprietary format, such as Microsoft's Word format, the article would have to be reworked for the Web posting and then probably reworked again for the book or journal. If the article was written in XML, however, it could be published to the three different environments simultaneously because the data of the article is independent of how it is being displayed. The formatting, layout, and so on are dependent upon the application using the data and are not attached to the content itself. Furthermore, the application code that displays the data needs to be written only once, and it then can be used to display any number of articles.
These are the three I can remember from all the XML books I've read in the past few months.
It's farly reasonable to assume that there wont be any major internet taxes imposed as any state will realise the danger of pushing business into other states and loosing out......
One would expect this to be true but then again if states like Texas can ban online car sales by car manufacturers solely to preserve the position of middlemen (car dealerships), who knows?
Here's an interview with the CEO of iCraveTV on C|Net.
I tried to watch the show but after the 1st 10 minutes the sheer chessiness of the show made me reach for my remote control. I had a good evening with Fox too with the new Episodes of the simpson's and malcom in the middle...but after only 10 minutes of X-files I swiitched to HBO to watch the Sopranos. Now that's a good show.
,Christopher's growing awareness of his talents and junior (Tony's kid not the uncle) quoting Nietzsze (sp?) and Master P when asking what man's purpose for being is. This is a great show.
Too bad it doesn't qualify as News for nerds cause I'd love to yak about Tony's neurosis,
Watching X-files has been a rather tedious experience for months now, and this episode is the straw that has broken this camel's back. Such cheap exploitative TV I expect from Fox but not on the X-files. This will mark my departure from watching the show. Adieu Mulder and scully it's been fun.
Synchronize a mobile device with a mobile device
We'd need a way for the mobile devices to talk to each other first. Either through a hardware standard(ugh!) or wireless protocol (such as Blutooth). Once that is done then we can concern ourselves with a uniform data transfer standard. Working at a mobile device to mobile device data transfer standard now would be putting the cart waaaay before the horse.
There I was thinking that ActiveX was a bad idea simply because of the dozen or so exploits I have seen announced ZDNet over the past few months (visit the Windows Update site sometime and count all the IE 5.0 patches).
.exe mind you) have the ability to modify system files on my machine? At least Java browser apps work in a security sandbox and cannot affect system files.
Actually I'm lying, the real reason ActiveX is a bad idea is that it gives waaaay too much power to in-browser apps. Why would I want a plug in I download from a website (not an application or
Free Software is NOT about making better software, is it NOT about fixing bugs and it is NOT about adding features. It is about MORAL rights and freedoms, it is about the right to study the source code just because I fell like it, about the right to use it to do whatever I want.
If people like you claiming that they have the right to see the source code so they can cheat at Quake are the kind of people that have been emailing Slade for the source no wonder he is pissed. First of all where the fsck did this RIGHT to look at software come from? Is there some country (not the US that's for sure) where this is some unalienable right?
From the GNU site: The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.
This seems to imply that the GPL is about bug fixes and adding features.
Also from the GNU page: For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
This also implies that the GPL is meant to be applied to people who are actually given the software or receive it in some way. I am not certain that Slade's program is being distributed to it's users and thus qualifies to have its source viewed on request.
Finally as for the original spirit of the GPL I have always likened it to automobiles and Microsoft's Windows. Now if I buy a car and something goes wrong with it (broken tail light, leaky radiator, whatever) nothing stops me from viewing the manufacturer's specs for my car, going over to Pep Boys to buy parts and tools, and fixing my car. Now on the other hand if Windows crashes and I have a Ph.D from M.I.T. in Operating Systems and got a 4.0 all through my college career I can't do shit but reboot and pray it doesn't happen again. This is wrong. It is wrongs like this that the GPL was created to right and NOT to satisfy some unalienable right to read everybody else's code.
PS: GPL is NOT like the public domain because you have no right to ask for code or do anything you like with it if the binaries were not distributed to you. As for Romeo and Juliet, it is in public domain because Shakespare is dead and has been dead for over 70 years. Of course when he was alive YOU would not have the right to do anything with HIS work if not approved by him.
Not sure when it was anounced but this story was on C|Net over two weeks ago.
What's really interesting is that even though FreePC has failed its legacy will live on. Hardware profit margins are now slim to non-existent and almost every major PC manufacturer is now involved in selling internet access to customers as a way to increase revenue streams from their customers. Who said scorched earth business models don't benefit the consumer?
Wrong comparison...it's the same thing as buying a CD and burning a copy for all your friends. The RIAA should be worried like this; for instance if I told you to go to MP3.com and select the user name MusicLover and the password PhatBeats to access all 200 of my CDs I have successfully ripped off 200 artists. This is rather interesting and right now it seems that no one is focusing on this.
Cmdr Taco: Kinda a fluff piece: any piece that explains what a compiler is is probably fluff
CNet: Much of the performance gain that's expected from Itanium will only become a reality if compilers can line up instructions in just the right way so that the chip can operate efficiently. And compilers also are an essential tool for getting higher-level software, such as databases or e-commerce software, to work on the new chip.
What stops me from getting an account at MP3.com, uploading some CDs then sharing this account with ALL my friends?
Won't this lead to the same kind of pseudo-piracy that exists today with downloading MP3s of people's computers via Napster? After all most sites allow you to log in from multiple computers, so what stops me from uploading a few CDs and posting my account info on my webpage so everyone can share my taste in music?
2. To Andover and Slashdot, as an African-American it is troubling to read threats of lynching on this board, but if that's how VA Linux Systems and Slashdot choose to handle its business competitors, so be it.
As an African in America it is troubling to see yet another black man hide behind so-called racism once they are caught in a bad situation.
As a programmer who one day hopes to contribute code that it will be GPLed it is troubling that a fellow black man may hide behind racism to justify the reasons his company refused to abide by my license.
By the way slashdot and VA Linux do not in any way control the content on this "board", so your comments on lynching should be directed at the posters of those comments and not Slashdot or VA Linux (I hope you don't think by playing the race card you will get them to censor those posts?)
That we've fucked up is not in dispute.
Glad you realize...we all mess up every once in a while but your company is taking this to the next level.
That we had the balls to come to New York should also not be in dispute.
It takes balls for a legitimate company to come to computer expo?
And, when we succed in our re-engineering and overhaul of our practices we'll expect the same level of coverage of that too. Beleive me when I say I'll be on your website every other day checking up on it and once there's any mention of a "successful engineering" slashdot will be flooded with submissions.
PS: I had a whole bunch of semi-technical questions regarding why you're sales staff don't know what RPM is (or that the R in it stands for Red Hat), or that VA Linux doesn't sell a linux distro or that your website runs Red Hat but I decided against it before I get accused of lynching you as well
We're here to serve the open source community. Period. If we ever fail or fall short in that mission, please don't hesitate to remind us.
Believe me, we will
I've read design patterns and agree that it is one of the most useful books I've ever read (right up there with books by Scott Meyers, Sedgewick and Bjarne Stousstrup)...Click on the Amazon link to read several comprehensive user reviews of the book just in case the link above seemed rather dry to you.
PS: Please do not buy this book on Amazon. Go to Addall and find a vendor. Please keep up the boycott...thank you.